by

Bill Cottringer

“Slow down you’re doing fine. You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.” ~Billy Joel.

     There is too much hype about thriving to success and way too many hits about that “race” on the I-net (only 360 million!). Even the most simple, profound and usable advice on how to win the success race is getting caught up in the chase to unload the overload. Chaos is mounting by the nanosecond and we are all running out of time, just trying to survive and getting more frustrated in the process.

     Maybe it is time to pause and think about how we can walk our way to success and still have enough breath left over to enjoy a little bit of it?  I like the saying, “death is nature’s way of telling us to slow down.”  It certainly makes its point.

     If the self-help/self-growth industry concentrates on slowing down to see how we can teach ourselves and others how to walk to success, we will be taking this success thing to a whole new level. And this effort is always a matter of good timing. All zestfully successful thrivers have to accept the dilemma they are part of.

    First, the more knowledge and wisdom you have, the more you identify with it to the point of staking your whole worth and selfhood on this valuable knowledge. You are more right and others are less right. But that builds a prideful ego so full of itself that no one is remotely interested in the most sensible of solutions. The barrel of good apples stinks.

     Secondly, having all this knowledge and wisdom and wanting to apply it liberally and freely to the masses is like being a driver of a car who is forced to stay patient idling the engine when all he or she really wants to do is rev it up, screech tires and lay rubber on the speedway.  Of course the impatience shows big-time and over-flavors the enemy pride and ego even further. And less running success is the obvious result, making the impatience worsen in a vicious circle.

    How do you walk to success in the self-growth and self-improvement business? Here are some walking lessons learned the hard way.

1.  You have to carefully listen to and understand other people’s problems before you know what the common ground is between you, where you can offer the most important part of your solutions to build upon what they are doing right, when the right time arises.  

     Sometimes when you are running, this is too much of a blur. And much of the time people really don’t want or even need your “cure.” They just want to be heard and understood. This is no longer common with just unhappily married female spouses with non-listening husbands.

2. You can know mountains of good stuff but it is only a valuable mountain to you. With others it may be more of an obstacle to getting to trust you enough to share vulnerabilities and secrets and ask questions. It is trite but true : People don’t care what you know until they know you care. And expressing genuine care doesn’t happen overnight or by instant fiat.

3.  Successful walking requires using supportive communication, whereas unsuccessful running relies on defensive communication. Walking to success involves being positive, polite, spontaneous, honest, empathetic, accepting, equal and tentative, while avoiding negativity, rudeness, manipulating dishonesty, insensitivity, judgment, superiority and over-certainty.

4.  When you are 3/4ths the way to your own success, that is usually the time when you want to offer advice to everyone else. But guess what? That is probably when you need to apply your own best advice to yourself to finish the job you started. And when you do that you won’t be talking as much as showing.

5.  There is only one way to deal with the impatience that interferes with walking to success. That is to ask others on the same journey, but maybe somewhat ahead up the road, how they deal with it.  They’ll tell you. It’s all about delaying your immediate need gratification with legitimate intermediate substitutes.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA, along with being a Sport Psychologist, Reality Repair Coach, Photographer and Writer. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, Re-braining for 2000 (MJR Publishing), Passwords to The Prosperity Zone (Authorlink Press), You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), The Bow-Wow Secrets (Wisdom Tree), and Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers). This article is part of his new book Reality Repair Rx coming soon. Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net